April 13, 2015

New issue: April 13th 2015

In the latest issue of JCB, two papers reveal that the enzyme Sac2 is a phosphoinositide 4-phosphatase that localizes to early endosomes and hydrolyzes PI(4)P. As explained in this week’s In Focus,Nakatsu et al. reveal that Sac2 teams up with the 5 phosphatase OCRL to remove endosomal PI(4,5)P2, while Hsu et al. show that, in the absence of Sac2, PI(4)P accumulates on early endosomes and inhibits endocytic recycling and slows cell migration.

Scheffler et al. reveal how two minus end-directed microtubule motors work in parallel to bring haploid nuclei together during fission yeast mating. As explained here, the kinesin motor Klp2 localizes to microtubules emanating from the spindle pole bodies associated with each haploid nucleus, and could potentially bring the nuclei together by sliding antiparallel microtubules past each other. Dynein, in contrast, localizes to the spindle pole bodies themselves, where it might pull on microtubules emanating from the other nucleus once Klp2 has brought them into close proximity.

And Juanes-Garcia et al. describe how a short, serine-rich motif in the non-helical tail domain of myosin II-B enables this motor protein to form stable actomyosin bundles that define the rear of migrating mesenchymal cells. Fenix and Burnette provide a commentary on the finding’s significance here, and senior author Miguel Vicente-Manzanares discusses his lab’s work in this month’sbiosights video podcast. You can watch below or subscribe in iTunes.

That’s all for today, but you can find lot’s of other interesting papers to read on our table of contents here.

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